The Amnesia Game
by speaks
Summary: A boy wakes up in a cell handcuffed to a stranger. Neither of them know their names or what they did to piss off the Galra Empire. He's got this, though. He just has to escape a Galra prison, navigate an alien city, figure out who he is, and survive the chaotic, sassy heartthrob attached to him at the wrist. Okay, except the last thing turns out to be harder than the rest combined.


This is a small thing I'm working on in between bigger fics. (NASA au, mermaid au, black paladin Lance fic, those are all on the way.)

This is kinda my way of taking back the klance dynamic from the hollow shell its become in these later seasons. Klance will always exist in my head this way, and nothing the show does can change it for me. I honestly don't give a shit about anything after S2 or S3 at this point lol. S1-3 klance for life, bitch.

* * *

 **The Amnesia Game**

* * *

Wet dust.

That's the first thing He notices as he breathes in through his nose.

Rough icy stone. That one's on his cheek.

Stale air that tastes like it hasn't ever been breathed before when He opens his mouth and tries to inhale some. Or maybe it's that his lungs feel like they've never been used before. _Yeah, that's it._

He opens his eyes, squinting in the dim purple light.

As he sits up he meets resistance by the way of his left hand, and when he looks down he finds another person staring at him wide eyed and alarmed. They're sitting against the wall of a small, square cell, handcuffed together.

"What the hell," He exclaims, scooting as far away from the stranger as he can while they're connected at the wrist by a pair of prison-grade plasma cuffs. The stranger is human; wearing all black, save for his white boots and his red leather jacket, cropped short like some kind of 80s biker gang wannabe. The guy has the hair for it too, jet black, his bangs hanging low and messy in his eyes, the back curling toward his shoulders. "Who are you?"

The stranger grimaces, his shoulders squared. "I… I don't know."

"What? How can you not know?!"

The stranger's nostrils flare in retaliation. "Well who are _you?"_

"I…"

Nothing.

He goes still as he reaches for his name and comes up blank. Oh no. He reaches farther, looking for a memory of his own face, a memory, anything before this cell, and finds nothing. Zip. Zilch. _This bitch empty. Yeet._

"Shit," He admits, "I don't know either." _Why can I remember Earth memes but not my own name. What is going on. What is this._

"Seriously?!"

"Shh!" He lunges forward to press his hand over the stranger's mouth as the unmistakable sound of distant footsteps on stone reach his ears. Panic begins to set in; the gravity of their situation growing stronger by the second. "Okay, so we're in a prison cell," He says as the stranger shoves his hand away.

"Yeah, looks like," the stranger agrees, and is that a hint of sarcasm? Rude. He says so, but the stranger keeps squinting around the cell. "Looks like a Galran prison. See those markings?"

Sure enough, right there on the wall are the telltale angular letters used by the Galra Empire. Sharp and curving, long and alien and recognizable but still very much unreadable—

"It says 'n ta sroká,'" the stranger whispers, his voice strangled with panic. "Death row."

"Oh God," He whispers back, not even bothering to wonder how this guy knows how to read Galran, "we're boned. There's someone coming! You hear that?! We're boned! Why would they bother to wipe our memories if they were just gonna kill us? Maybe they tortured us? We must be spies or something, fuck—"

"Shut up," the stranger says, "get up. Quick."

Despite his own panic and terror He follows the stranger's directions. Together they get to their feet and move toward the windowless cell door, eyeing each other in barely concealed panic. Even though he's freaking out in every sense of the word and the stranger is too, there's a bit of calm in the stranger's presence, in the simple fact that someone else is here; whatever is happening to them, they're going through it together. He's not alone, and that in itself some kind of enigmatic solace. An umbrella in a hurricane. At least he has something solid to hang onto as he gets swept away.

"When the door opens," the stranger whispers, his over-dilated pupils reflecting the mania He feels himself, "we're going to jump them. Do you see anything we could use as a weapon?"

Together they rake their eyes over the room as the footsteps crescendo, as if whoever the footsteps belong to have rounded a corner. It's futile. "No," He says, then pats his pockets belatedly. He's wearing tattered blue jeans and some kind of— _I dunno_ —an army jacket? "Wait." On the back of his belt—

He unhooks the clunky object he finds hanging there, raising it up between them. A curved white.. thing, with blue accents, heavier than it looks considering its size. Dense. The word comes slowly. _Bayard._

 _Huh._

The color blue sticks in his mind like an arrow in a bird. Sinks into sea sand. Soars through the wide open sky, ground miles beneath him and falling farther, exchanging sky for stars, exchanging safety for justice, exchanging home for infinity… _This is me,_ he thinks, _somehow_. _This is me. I'm Blue_.

"I think this might be some kind of weapon," Blue says aloud, still blinking the flurry of metaphysical stars out of his eyes. Turning the bayard over and over in his hands, he succumbs to frustration. There's a wealth of power in here, he just knows it, but he hasn't the slightest clue how to tap it. "I don't know how to activate it."

"Just hit him over the head with it, then!"

"Hey, you have one too!" Sure enough, right there on the stranger's belt is a matching bayard, although his is red.

The stranger cranes his neck around to look at it. "...Huh." The stranger's eyebrows furrow deep as he stares down at the red bayard, his thumb brushing on the red stripe nearest to him, and Blue relates keenly to his mystified expression, having just experienced the same soul-gripping sensation about five seconds ago.

"I know, right?" Blue mutters with frustration, and that's when the cell door opens.

Their heads snap up at once to the Galra guard standing there in the doorway. The guard is caught—ironically— _completely_ off-guard by the two prisoners' position so close to the exit, but after a moment of shared surprise, his face darkens and he moves to level his gun at them. They don't even need to speak, Blue and Red. They launch into action at the same time, lunging forward, clotheslining the guard between them with their handcuffed arms. The impact jars Blue's shoulder but the guard hits the ground, which is good, but then there are more. _Fuck_. Something sizzles by Blue's left ear as Red goes for the Guard 2, kicking his feet out from under him, the fact that they're hooked together making Blue's life three times harder as he wrestles the blaster from Guard 1. The second the blaster is in his hands his confidence shoots up by about ten degrees. He shoots Guard 1 in the leg as he makes a lunge for Red, who's currently dispatching Guard 3 while Guard 2 lies unconscious beyond—Blue shoots Guard 3 in the chest right as five more guards round the corner. From a loudspeaker above them an alarm begins to blare, casting purple-white flashes down the walls.

Red is stooping down to snatch Guard 2's gun when Blue wrenches him away, turning heel to sprint in the opposite direction of the advancing guards. "What the hell?" Red splutters. "I needed that gun!"

"Sorry Red," Blue shouts back, "no time! I'll cover us!"

Red takes the lead as Blue stumbles, trying to both shoot over his shoulder, dodge return fire, and watch where they're going at the same time. His shoulder nearly yanks out of his socket when Red pulls a sharp right, ducking into an open doorway that turns out to be a switchbacking staircase, separated by individual landings between every floor.

Together they hurtle down a half a floor, taking it four steps at a time, so that they end up going so fast by the time they reach the landing where the stairs turn that they stumble and slam into the far wall and are forced to pause and get their bearings. "Red?" is what Red chooses to say in that moment, eyeing Blue like he's doubly lost his mind. _"Red?"_

"Yeah," Blue pants. Red should probably shut up and just be grateful for the temporary name. "Get it?" He points at the bayard at Red's waist, then his own. "You're red, I'm blue—"

"GET DOWN!"

Blue goes down, but only because Red has tackled him. It's a horrible angle and they end up in the corner of the landing, half on the floor and tangled together as the wall they were catching their breath against explodes into rubble with a deafening pulse that leaves Blue's ears ringing. Or maybe that's because Red just smacked his head against the tile. Probably both. Either way he finds himself standing again as he shakes it off, though he doesn't remember standing, and then suddenly—daylight.

Broad, broad daylight, and the familiar bluster of civilization. City sounds.

"Oh, fuck yes," Red breathes, "come on, Blue."

There's shouting behind them and the _pew-pew_ and acrid singe-smell of laserfire as they climb into the opening blown into the side of the prison by the grenade. "Woah," Blue says faintly. This is one tall-ass building. Above and below them speeders whizz past at varying sizes and speeds, paying no heed at all to the prison escape unfolding nearby.

"Son of a bitch," Red says as Blue fires blindly back over his shoulders at their attackers, his voice faint as he ducks a laser and has to catch his footing. A single white brick falls away from Red's boot, quickly becoming the size of an ant and vanishing. "We're dead."

"No we're not," Blue says, shoving his blaster into Red's free hand, who glances at Blue confounded but resumes firing at the guards out of sheer necessity while Blue turns his eyes on the speeders below them. Adrenaline surges in his gut, slowing time, dimming everything in the universe save for his target. He takes the hand handcuffed to his and grabs it tight, tighter than he's probably ever grabbed someone's hand before (although it's not like he remembers). "Hold tight," he says, "we jump on three. My count."

"Your count?" Red wheezes. "Why should I trust your count?"

"I never miss," Blue says, and he doesn't know _how_ he knows this, but he knows that it's true.

And there it is. A small open-backed cargo ship, approaching from about one or two floors below them, about fifteen feet off the side of the city block. Bingo. He studies the buildings as the ship passes them, approximating its speed, shifting his feet. Bracing himself. "One—"

"I want a say in this!"

"Two—"

 _"Shit!"_

Despite his vocal resistance, Red jumps exactly on "Three!" when Blue does.

Ah, uninhibited parachute-less freefall. There's nothing like it in the universe.

 _Don't let me die nameless,_ Blue prays.

And then they're landing, crashing straight down through stacks of crates that crumple like balsa wood, sending grains of greenish rice spraying and scattering in every direction, burying them in splinters and ruined supplies in a matter of seconds. It takes a full five minutes of bickering and shoving after that to extract themselves from the broken pile and maneuver their way to an undamaged part of the cargo hold. It's a tight squeeze between the stacks of crates, but it's better than sitting in jagged wood and weird-and-possibly-toxic alien rice. Red's cheek is cut and bleeding under his eye, and Blue is pretty sure he himself bruised a rib or two, and he _definitely_ sprained the wrist that's handcuffed to Red's. The way Red's holding his hand still means he's either sprained his wrist too, or he's noticed Blue's discomfort and is trying to accommodate. Blue doesn't know enough about Red to know which one it is without asking. He doesn't know _anything_ about Red, actually, which wasn't a problem when they were escaping prison together ten minutes ago. But now? Kind of a problem.

"We need to get off this ship ASAP," Red says, angling his face toward the sliver of golden sky visible between the stacked crates above them. The drop of blood that had been welling up in the cut below his eye falls away, dripping toward his chin, and for some reason Blue feels the urge to wipe it off.

"Okay, first things first though," Blue says, and takes Red's momentary distraction to snatch the blaster back from him. (Finders keepers.) "Let's get unhooked, yeah?"

Red blanches at him, reaching for the blaster but then taking a full step back and colliding with the nearest crate when he realizes his arm is just a _liiittle_ shorter than Blue's, and that the blaster is therefore out of reach. "You're not pointing that thing anywhere near me."

"Dude, relax," Blue huffs. "I told you, I never miss."

"How do you know that? You don't even know your name!"

"I just do, okay? And you _just saw_ proof! Where was my 'wow, holy shit, you're such a good shot Blue' when I nailed this impossible landing on a moving speeder? I really think I've earned like, at least one iota of trust from you!" As he speaks he gets more and more worked up, gesticulating with his hands and consequently flinging Red's right arm around until he looks like he's ready to chop it off himself.

"Ugh, fine," Red blurts, " _fine,_ oh my god, just do it. I'd rather lose a hand on accident at this point than be attached to you one second longer."

"Okay, first of all? Rude."

"Yeah?" Red sasses right back with enough snark to kill a lesser man. "And second of all?"

"Second of all," Blue says, and shoots the plasma string connecting their handcuffs without even looking, without ever taking his eyes off of Red's.

Red is the one to break the staring contest at that point, gaping down at their newly disconnected cuffs for a few moments of disbelief (which is so, so satisfying), and then finally looking back up at Blue. "I want to fucking strangle you right now," he says, "but you're my only goddamn clue to who I am or what is going on. _Fuck_. Let's just get off this stupid ship."

It's slow-going but they climb out topside only knocking over one stack of boxes on their way up. Sirens are still blaring in the distance, more obvious now that they're up in the open air, but they don't see any Galra drones in the immediate area, and the sirens sound far enough to make their escape of this cargo ship feasible. They're about to pass a long city block of shorter buildings, the rooftops approximately within _'this is gonna hurt like hell but probably won't kill us if we tuck and roll'_ distance. "Okay," Blue says moving to the rim of the cargo hold, "on my count again. One—"

Red jumps.

"Hey!" Blue shrieks, but he's long gone.

Of course. Swearing under his breath, he steels himself and lunges across the gap, willing himself not to look down as he arches toward the rooftop, barely making it over the ledge and tumbling about ten feet diagonally before slamming hard into a chimney. For a minute he just lies there and thanks whoever's up there beyond that alien yellow sky that he's survived the last thirty minutes of his life. Then he forces himself to stand, and begins to backtrack, because he and Red are now three rooftops apart.

The buildings here are all connected to each other, covered in ornate carvings and columns and arches, the roofs tiled with bright colors wherever they slope downward toward the sky-streets, filled in with rooftop gardens and skylights shining inward wherever they lay flat. Blue steers wide of these skylights and uses the gardens for cover whenever he sees drones flying nearby. The whole city gives off a distinctly Parisian vibe, which is weirdly at odds with the whole 'home of a large Galra prison facility' thing. It's super weird. The city is so.. lovely. But he doesn't have time to think too much about it.

"You're an idiot," Blue accuses when he climbs a set of pipes and finally comes out onto the roof where Red landed, where he's now leaning against another, larger chimney. "This building was almost too tall to make the jump. You could've died."

"Whatever. It was worth it for the look on your face right now." His words are downright infuriating, but the smirk he gives Blue when he says it makes Blue's stomach twist in a pleasant way that sits directly at odds with his irritation. There's something surprisingly playful about that look. Is he—? No way. Is Red _flirting_ with him?

They move on wordlessly, heading north (or what Blue guesses is north) toward a denser collection of buildings with a wider variety of terraces and outcroppings, making for better cover than this small neighborhood of skylight gardens. While they walk, Blue wonders. Now that he has time and he's not being fired at or jumping across mile-deep chasms, he lets Red lead the way and focuses the majority of his own brain power on Red, watching him from behind as they go. The adrenaline ebbs and his curiosity grows as they bury themselves in the rooftop labyrinth. What _are_ he and this other guy to each other? They were in a cell together. Death row. They'd done something serious to slight the Galra Empire, and they'd possibly done it together. Do they know each other? Are they partners in crime? Are they rebels together, maybe from the same faction? They're clearly both from Earth (he takes a second to puzzle hard over the fact that he remembers Earth but not what country on Earth he's from). Are they family? Are they friends? Are they something _more?_

He's concentrating so hard that he doesn't see the drone round the corner until Red is yanking him by the jacket into a thin alleyway between two brick walls. There's a window there, but it's boarded up, and then a dead end. Outside their little crevice, purple-white lights flash by, accompanied by a low mechanical hum. Search drone.

They hold their breath and keep still until the lights disappear, but even then they hang back. Better to give it some time. Let the drone put some distance between them.

"Hey," Blue says quietly, sliding down the wall into sitting position for a well-deserved rest. "As long as we're here, let's compare clues. We need to figure out who we are as soon as we can, or we're just running blind."

"What clues? We've got nothing," Red mutters, forever contrary, but he does make a small show of cooperation by turning and sitting down beside Blue.

"Well we've got these," Blue reminds him, unhooking the bayard from his belt and turning it over to inspect it more closely. "It's called a bayard, I think."

Red pulls his out too, holding it up for comparison. "Yeah, it is. I don't know how I know that though. I can remember everything about the world except my place in it. That's strange, right? Amnesia doesn't usually work that way, I'm pretty sure."

Through the gap between buildings Blue can see the nearest flightpath of speeders, sees a cherry-red Nach Kenner, an Olkarian N20, a retired S-67 battle cruiser. He glances down at the stolen blaster at his side—an S-19 dual-core, a cheap and out of date weapon usually given to low-level grunts. Come to think of it, he could even name the rankings of the Galra guards that had attacked and pursued them just by the markings on their uniforms. Okayy. "Yeah," Blue admits, "it's hella strange. Oh— Idea. Hang on."

With his free hand he starts to search his jacket, looking for any other physical clues. Maybe he's got something else on him. An ID or something. But his jacket pockets are empty, save for a plain black hair tie. Which is weird, considering his hair isn't long enough to tie back. Maybe he has a girlfriend or something? He tries not to think about the fact that Red's hair is long enough to tie back, if he wanted to. He doesn't seem to recognize the tie. Anyway. He puts it away and moves on to his jean pockets. Empty. Completely empty, all four of them.

"Well, that was a bust," Red deadpans.

"Wait!" Right when he's about to give up he finds a _secret pocket,_ sewn into the inner lining of his jacket. And there's something inside. A folded piece of paper.

He pulls it out and it falls open along the creases, in that weak, easy manner of a paper that's been folded and unfolded along the same lines hundreds and hundreds of times. He looks at the photo blankly, the faces… a group portrait… "My family," he says. The names flood him. Mama, Benito, Marco— he rakes his eyes over every face, pairing names with eyes and personalities like little sparkles of light in the dark, and he _knows_ them, he knows these people are his family. "I'm from Cuba." The words fall out without his permission, and his eyes stick on the one unfamiliar face, the one person he can't pin. "This is the only person I can't name," he grumbles, pointing with his thumb.

Red leans in to look, then huffs, his breath hot on Blue's cheek. "That's _you_ , Blue."

"Ah."

Blue sighs, looks for just a moment longer, then puts the photo away. "Your turn then."

So Red goes through his own pockets one by one, and finds nothing at all. No secret pockets on the inside of his cropped jacket, either. "Hmm, hold up," he says, then leans over to poke and prod at his boots. "Ha. Nice." And to Blue's shock he reaches into the side of his boot and whips out a silver dagger. Blue's jaw drops.

"You had that this whole time?!"

"I guess so." Red looks it over, pulling at the binding wrapped around the blade, and suddenly goes rigid and still when he sees a purple marking near the hilt.

"What?" Blue leans in, gearing for a better look. "What is it? What does this marking mean?"

"I— I don't know," Red says, and his voice is casual but he looks extremely troubled all of a sudden, almost to the point of looking sick. Haphazardly he rewraps the binding on the sharp part of the blade and tucks it back where he found it, refusing to meet Blue's eye. When he's done he throws his head back, his adam's apple bobbing as he swallows thickly, his gloved hands fisting on the ground

"Hey," Blue offers as softly as he can manage. "I don't know whats going on, but we're going to figure it out okay? You and me."

With that he shifts onto his knees, getting ready to stand, and offers his hand out to Red. There's a long moment where Red doesn't seem to understand what Blue is offering at first, but then he takes his hand. Slowly. And then just… sits there. He simply sits there looking at their clasped hands for a moment, then at Blue's face, his eyebrows furrowed deeply in thought, his mouth curving into a confused frown.

"What?"

"I.. nothing," Red says, shaking it off, and then he's the one pulling Blue to his feet. "Let's get somewhere out of sight before these search drones come back. Then we can rest up and make some kind of plan."

They resume travelling along the rooftops again, this time towards a nearby bell tower which rests atop an old church-like structure that looks hundreds of years older than most of these other buildings. All the while Blue keeps catching Red staring at him out of the corner of his eye, always with that same thoughtful expression on that had come over him back in the alley.

From the inside of the bell tower when they're finished climbing they can see for miles, the cloud-streaked golden sky, the miles of city, the sparkling pink ocean in the distance, glittering with refracted light from the sun where it sinks in the west out of sight beyond the taller highrises. "Okay, what gives," Blue says as they finally settle in, sitting with their backs to the inside of one of the pillars so that they can see out, but nothing can see them without them seeing it first. "Why do you keep looking at me like that?"

To his surprise Red blushes and turns away. "I— I'm not."

That... was the worst cover up ever. "Dude."

"It's nothing, okay?" he snaps. "It's just, I had this really vivid déjà vu back in that alleyway and I just… can't stop thinking about it. It's probably nothing."

Nothing, his ass. Blue jumps on that so fast. "What? Don't say that. Déjà vu, huh? It could be important. We have _amnesia_ , dude, this could be a clue! Pick at that scab, man. Keep trying to remember. It could explain how we know each other."

"Well I can't just force myself to remember," he grumbles. "It's just a feeling."

"What kind of feeling?"

Red presses his lips into a tight line and crosses his arms.

"Help me out here," Blue pleads. "This is our only lead, man. What kind of feeling?"

"I don't know, exactly. It's... multifaceted. I just know that whatever happened, it was something important."

"Hmm…" Blue rubs his chin, examining Red's tense posture and walled-off face. He's obviously struggling with this. Maybe it's a traumatic memory or something. Even so, they can't afford to let this clue go; it's all they have in the world at the moment. "Maybe we should reenact it?" he suggests.

Blue's amazed that it's even possible, but Red tenses up even more. "I don't know if that would help."

"Well do you have any better ideas?"

"We're not reenacting it. That's stupid."

"Okay. Fine. Have it your way. I guess we'll just sleep here in this bell tower like a couple of Quasimodo hobos, does that sound good? And then tomorrow we'll continue our aimless trek through the city, maybe steal some food so we dont starve, maybe get caught by the Galra, sleep on the street again if we don't, maybe the next day we can find a guitar so we can start our new lives as amnesiatic street performers—"

"Okay, _okay_ ," Red bursts, throwing his arms out, " _Jesus._ You always have to get your way, don't you?"

"Look," Blue levelled with him, "we can either do this now, or we can fester on it for a few days until we realize we have no other choice but to talk about it and then we can do it. Might as well get it over with, right?" Knowing full well that he's right, he grins in triumph, but it slowly slips as Red doesn't look any less troubled at the prospect of reliving this memory, whatever it is. "It's.. it's a heavy memory, isn't it," Blue prods.

"Yeah," Red says. "I think it must be."

"Well, at least I'll have to remember it too," Blue jokes, "if I was there. But as of now, I don't know what memory you're talking about. Walk me through it?"

Dropping his face into one hand, Red lets out a long, strangled, inhuman noise. If Blue had to label it he would say 'verbal keysmash.' "I don't know where to start," Red finally blurts when Blue begins to laugh.

"Well, what triggered the déjà vu?"

"When you grabbed my hand, I guess."

"O-okay," Blue says, feeling his face heat up. _Can't back down now, this was your idea, Blue._ "Let's do that again, then." He shifts onto his knees like he did back in the alley, turning so that they're facing each other at an angle. Behind Red's shock of black hair the evening sky is fading from that golden orange to blood red. "Just pretend this isn't awkward as fuck," Blue instructs.

Red laughs, but it's short and breathy and somewhat forced. "Okay." He mirrors Blue's half-kneeling position and reaches for his hand, taking it firmly.

For the first minute nothing happens except that a flock of alien birds goes soaring by, distracting Blue briefly. Red isn't distracted. He's staring at their hands, and as Blue tears his eyes from the flock where its turning behind the clocktower, Red slowly looks up. Right into Blue's eyes. And his heart starts to race, because this _is_ familiar, actually… It comes back to him in disjointed flashes. It's buried between waves of fire, fear, and agony, but it's there. It's unmistakably _there_ , like a solid rock in a stormy sea, peeking up between the waves. If he could only grab on…

Red furrows his eyebrows, his concentration intensifying with the eye contact, his grip on Blue's hand growing tighter and tighter every second, his frown growing more— _oh._

 _That's it,_ Blue thinks, _that's whats wrong with this picture._

"I think," he says, surprising both of them, "that you were smiling, though." Red's grip slackens just a bit as Blue reaches up with his free hand and pushes at Red's cheek with his thumb, lifting the corner of his lip by just a centimeter. Then he pulls his hand away, letting it linger just an inch off his skin. But the smile sticks in place without his help. A soft curve, barely there, the barest peek of the miles and miles of person underneath, so close but still out of reach. "Yeah," he breathes, "like that."

"I think," Red says, sounding as shell-shocked as Blue feels, "that I wanted to kiss you."

Blue can see this scene in his mind's eye now, even though it's hazy and cracked. The feeling is there, echoing back to Blue now from the darkest of places. They were young and stupid and full of so much fire. Maybe they still are. "I think I would have let you if you'd tried."

There's a long quiet moment as Red absorbs that.

Unable to wait, Blue breathes out a shaky breath, putting his hand back on Red's face and letting it fan out completely. His heart skips when Red offers no objection. "Red, do you think maybe we're...?" But he doesn't have time to finish before Red releases his hand and grabs his jaw, surging forward to kiss him hard on the mouth.

The kiss consumes him. The world falls away—the prison, the Galra, the bell tower, the sunset—it's just Red, just this _boy_ and the slide of his mouth, the heat of his breath in the cold, cold altitude and the evening air. It ignites Blue's veins, but not the way the memory did. This doesn't come with that flash of recognition at all. It's all new.

When Red pulls away from him it's with as little warning as when he kissed him in the first place. "Okay, we've never done that before. I would remember."

"Yeah, I would _definitely_ remember that," Blue purrs at him, tugging at his neck, trying to pull him back in for another.

"Wait."

That deeply troubled expression is back on his face. "Did you remember something?" Blue wonders.

"No," he says, "that's the problem. I don't remember kissing you. That means we weren't… that we're not together."

"So? _Clearly_ we want to be."

"We don't know that. We don't even know who we are, let alone what we are to each other."

Blue finally lets his hand fall away, hurt prickling in his chest. "You don't trust me, do you?"

"That's not it," Red huffs, shoving away from Blue completely so that he can stand and pace. "It's just—we could be anyone! Maybe one of us is a rebel and the other isn't. Maybe one of us is a spy and the other isn't. Maybe one of us is good and the other _isn't."_

"Woah, hey," Blue soothes, shooting to his feet, holding his hands up like he's calming an angry stallion. In Red's pacing he's gotten far closer to the open edge of the belltower than Blue is comfortable with. "What are you talking about?"

"Look," he says, "I... lied, earlier." Leaning down he pulls that knife out of his boot again, holding it up between them like it's poisoned. "I do know what these markings are," he says. "They're _Galran._ And I think I am too."

"You're…"

"Part Galra." He's staring pointedly away now, eyes shining with more than just the reflection of sunset.

"Okay, no," Blue says, "first of all, come away from the edge before I have a heart attack." He grabs Red and reels him in. "And wipe that look _right_ off your face. This doesn't mean anything except that perhaps you've got Galra genes. It doesn't say anything about who you are." The words glance off Red like he's wearing word-proof armor. He simply huffs, still refusing to look Blue in the eye. So Blue grabs his chin and forces him to. Waits to speak until he's looking. Only when he is does Blue say, "It doesn't speak for anything you've ever done or will do. Don't write yourself off just because of a _knife,_ man."

Red blinks up at him with wet eyes, looking stricken. "But the Galra have done so many unspeakable things. And I'm.. The fact that I might be one of them is just…"

"Listen, even if you were full on hundred percent galra, you're not defined by your DNA, okay? Nobody is. Hey." He slows down, pressing their foreheads together, moving his thumb to the corner of Red's eye, ready to wipe the tear welling there if it ever falls. The words come out almost on their own. Like muscle memory. Pure instinct. "You weren't born with blood on your hands, Keith."

It happens fast, when it happens.

Red's eyes blow wide open, sudden recognition flooding his face. "Lance," he gasps.

"Wh— What did you just say?"

"That's exactly what you said the first time I told you this," Red laughs— _no, not Red_ —clutching helplessly at the collar of his jacket. "I remember you. Your name is Lance."

The trippy retroactive catch-up and the flood of memory that explodes behind Lance's eyes is short lived, because suddenly his arms are dissolving right in front of him. Disintegrating. He's vanishing.

Panic floods him, a visceral and primal lightning bolt of fear, and his instincts take over again. "Keith," he breathes, the word falling from his tongue before he's really even finished connecting the name with the face, the word his fallback, like a jet's backup landing gear, like a runaway truck ramp on a blizzard wrought mountainside. "Keith, help," he panics, "what's _happening—_ "

But it's too fast. There's no time. Barely enough time to even panic properly. Just enough time to see Keith looking down at his own body as he too begins to disintegrate from the ground up. Then everything goes black.

.

.

Rubber. Sterile metal. A blank black pixelated screen.

Lance's senses come back to him all at once. His breathing is loud inside the helmet—the VR helmet, he remembers with total and agonizing clarity. He reaches up and tugs at it. The helmet and headphones come off with a little electrical singe as the mechanisms disconnect from his brainwaves, and his eyes burn as they adjust to the bright neon lights outside the safety of the dark helmet.

He remembers now. How they were given a few hours free time before the diplomatic meeting to roam the ground-level marketplace of the remarkable Æjad city. How the four younger paladins split off from the others and thus found the most exciting and technologically-advanced arcade they'd ever seen. How Lance found the amnesia game, how Hunk pointed out the multiplayer option, how Lance challenged Keith even though it wasn't a 'versus' type of game. _Whoever remembers their name first wins,_ Lance declared as they stood in the scanners that would translate their bodies and belongings into the virtual representation of Æjad.

Heart like molten lava and stomach like the open sea, Lance stares at the little touchscreen on the game console where they'd selected 'multiplayer,' listening to the telltale sounds of Keith removing his headgear beside him. Hunk and Pidge have disappeared, probably having grown bored at waiting for them to finish, leaving Lance alone to deal with this nightmare. As he looks at the touchscreen he can feel the volcano and the ocean meeting in his chest, solidifying into something new. Something terrifying. NEW HIGH SCORE is flashing on the screen with little fireworks around the edges, _'Lance and Keith'_ blinking in at number four on a list of the top ten all time scores for the Expert play setting. Lance feels like he's going to faint. _What have I done._

Keith's voice is deadpan and emotionless when he speaks on Lance's left. "Well, that happened."

Lance wheels on him with incredulous and exasperated fury. How can he _be_ like that when Lance is having the emotional crisis of the century? He opens his mouth to tell Keith which bodily orifice he can shove his attitude into, thinks better of it, then turns and flees.

"Hey, hey wait! Lance! Lance?"

Keith catches up at the emergency exit near the back as Lance enters the back alley, ready to run for his fucking life. But Keith has other ideas. As he clears the doorway, letting it slam behind him, he seizes Lance by the arm and digs his heels into the cobblestones.

"Get off me," Lance snaps.

"No."

"Dude, _fuck off_."

But Keith doesn't fuck off. "Look," he says, "we can either do this now, or we can let it fester for a few days until we realize we have no other choice but to talk about it and then we can do it. Might as well get it over with, right?"

"Don't use my own words against me!" Lance shouts, willing himself not to cry in front of Keith, _Keith,_ his greatest rival, his greatest friend, his _hopeless_ fucking soul-crushing crush who's always seen right through Lance no matter what he did. "Just let go, I'm not kidding." Fuck, his voice is starting to break. Time to go. He gives one great big heave and breaks Keith's grip.

"For fuck's sake, don't make me chase you down, Lance," Keith shouts as Lance frees himself and starts down the alley again.

"Maybe it serves you right," Lance shouts back. "Maybe _you_ should have to chase after _me_ for once!"

Keith slows in his tracks, but doesn't stop. "Fine."

Lance does stop, if only out of shock, resisting the urge to dig his finger in his ear.

"What?"

"I said fine," Keith repeats, quieter this time, and approaches Lance slowly. "If you run I'll chase after you." He says it softly. Flirtatiously _._

 _Shit._

"You can't— You can't just say stuff like that," Lance reels, his face burning.

The space between them has closed again and Lance's feet are frozen in place. Somewhere around the corner he can hear the sounds of the marketplace, but it all feels much farther away than it actually is. "You do remember it," Keith says, a hint of accusation in his tone.

"What, the infamous bonding moment?" Lance laughs nervously, tugging at the bottom of his jacket. This flirty shit is really throwing him for a loop. "Is that really where we're starting?"

"Yeah. It is. You would have let me kiss you, if I'd tried?"

He swallows, taking a huge step back when he realizes exactly how close Keith's gotten. Sirens are blaring in his head. Is this some kind of trick? "No? Yes? Maybe? I don't know?"

"Stop backing away," Keith says, slipping into a laugh as his hands find their way to Lance's collar, and no _way_ is this seriously happening.

Except it is. It's very much happening.

"What do you want to kiss me for anyway," he mutters as Keith tilts his head up and pulls Lance down until their breath becomes one, their noses brushing.

Keith huffs at him, managing to sound frustrated and amused and endeared all at once. His mouth opens and closes, searching for the words. "Because you're you," he finally says. "What other reason do I need?"

"Oh," Lance says, the realization dawning that maybe he doesn't know Keith quite as well as he thought he did. Or that maybe he doesn't know himself as well as Keith does.

They still have time to learn, he supposes. They have all the time in the universe. But for now he shuts up and kisses Keith. He kisses Keith long and slow, until the golden sun-streaked sky turns blood red, until it fades from blood red to crimson-navy to a starry, nebulous, galactic black, and maybe they end up missing the diplomatic meeting that they came to Æjad for in the first place (that's a big whoops and a slap on the hand from Allura and Shiro later that night)... but you know what?

Worth it.

* * *

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